Mike Scholtis
Media Designer / Digital Artist
Cologne, Germany
My name is Mike Scholtis. I live and grew up near cologne in germany. As a child i loved watching naruto and started drawing through it. Before that i was doodling every now and then but never had a deeper encounter with drawing or painting.Rreal interest in art and painting i developed through the videogame “Guild wars 1 and 2”. The artworks of kekai kotaki impressed me so much that i started to deal with it myself. I bought the art book of guild wars 1 and looked at it a lot. Later i looked around more and more on the internet to see what can be painted and what can be used to paint different artworks. When I started my training as a media designer I quickly came into contact with photoshop and learned how to edit images and design pictures and illustrations. my first work was an abstract image of burg eltz 2013. Over the years i have made fanarts for dayz and for fun wallpaper design and much more.
Over the years i learned the brushes of photoshop and bought my first graphics tablet, the UGEE G5. With it i started to paint portraits. At that time i was most inspired by Agnes Cecile. I followed and studied her works for years. During that time i also started to think of an artist name. My first artist name was “miltenart”. I got the name milten from the videogame “Gothic”. But it didn’t take me long to think of a real name. After months of thinking about it, i came up with “DEMORIE”. The name is made up of “de” from the latin for “about” and “morie” from “memory”. together, the word should mean something like “about memories”.
Like any artist, you are marked by the experiences you have had. I have developed into someone who is very aware of his feelings and thoughts and takes them in very strongly, which automatically leads to understanding more about empathy.
I’ve always been interested in embedding feelings and emotions in the pictures i paint. It’s always been important to me that it’s not about embodying feelings or emotions in an obvious way. It often takes a moment to see in which emotional direction a picture is going. But basically everything is subjective interpretation and therefore different for everyone.
Under the name “DEMORIE” i publish since 2013-2014 many portraits in minimalist style with techniques from watercolor painting. Over the past years i have been influenced more and more by different artists. I have summarized here a list of the people who have inspired me the most in the last 8 years through their works.
- Agnes cecile
- kekai kotaki
- Yizheng Ke
- Toko Suzuki
- Serge Marshennikov
- Nick Alm
- Izumi Kogahara
- Alpay Efe
- Wangjie Li
- Will Yu
- Habiba Green
- Jeremy Lipking
- Tito Merello Vilar
- Kris Coolens
Today, i’m more intensively involved with oil painting techniques that i want to incorporate into my digital art. Of course, this includes customized brushes and tools that i build myself in photoshop. The possibilities are endless and i take advantage of that as a digital artist. I find rough painting with a focus on essential details very appealing and try to continue studying this type of painting. I also really like abstract elements that break up realism.
I still paint for fun and distraction. I see myself as a hobby painter who is happy when others feel inspired by my works.